Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday November 25, 2012 @06:00PM
from the because-you-can dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Following the news that Minecraft has been ported to the Raspberry Pi, Mojang has announced a new augmented reality iOS app. The app uses your iOS device's camera to track your surroundings before projecting creations onto the landscape. Not only can you see the results on your screen, but you can change their size as you please, and also walk around them to view from different angles."

Has anyone managed to get Minecraft working on OSX Mountain Lion? - Apple removed the java plugin, and Oracle Java 7 doesn't appear to be compatible with OpenGL. The closest Ive managed is to get it running in Windows 7, under virtual box. But, its far from ideal.

I believe when you try and run a Java app for the first time, it prompts to install, and does so. I'm running Minecraft using the.app launcher and I don't remember having to fight it on a brand new MacBook Air with Mountain Lion.

This doesn't bring anything into the real world. You just get to look at it on a different screen. I guess I'm impressed with the app's ability to track where you're standing and pointing the camera, but "brings... into the real world" should really be something more like a system to format your creations for use with a 3-D printer.

I think it is more about the direction it can evolve into. Add wearable AR glasses, less blocky models and 'laser' tag guns and you might get quite interesting variations on cooperative outdoor 'paintball' (think Starship Troopers).

This is how it starts - and we end up with cyberpunk, cover-your-person-in-AR-avatar world where you don't know if something is real before your touch it. Plus obligatory http://xkcd.com/331/ [xkcd.com] becomes true...

It'll be interesting to see if this spawns some new creative building options in Minecraft - specifically tailoring a construction to act as a facade for a building. Theoretically you could transform a street when viewed through your device, which could be an interesting building challenge or competition.

The AR tracking component is about what you'd expect - requires localised areas of high contrast to track from and doesn't work well on non-flat surfaces - but for what it is, it could be pretty neat. Per

In other news, Mojang's Notch was arrested today on suspicion of conspiracy to commit terrorism. Reportedly, he used augmented reality to design a 6' green creature containing an undetermined amount of explosives. The designs explained that when a student got near the creature, it would release a hiss. If the student was unaware and did not then leave, the creature would detonate leaving a crater full of loose brick, stone, and dirt.

Police are currently investigating this claim, as well as claims that tripwire-launched arrows and various other TNT-based traps were also designed and disseminated to the students via YouTube. At the time of publication, we have heard rumors of an other-worldly creature wandering the halls of the Mojang studio. It appears to be a sort of zombie, clad only in a pair of tight jeans and a dark turtleneck growling and murmuring something about a 'walled garden'.